Interviews from Volusia investigation show Sotolongo used violence to manage Waverly Media

Saturday

Aug 16, 2014 at 10:12 PMAug 16, 2014 at 11:03 PM

By Andrew Gantandrew.gant@news-jrnl.com

Some of the people who worked with Waverly Media founder Jimmy Sotolongo, the ones who found themselves in violent confrontations or saw him flipping office desks in anger, still fear him.Others, most notably his former business partner Volusia County Councilman Josh Wagner, still count him as a friend.As the Volusia council moves closer to the end of its long and unprecedented investigation of Sotolongo’s Waverly Media, the stories of his temper, his past and his political connections are becoming part of the public record for the first time. Wagner, who has long faced questions about his association with Sotolongo, had a name for it: “Slanderpalooza.” “What I have to tell all of these people is: Get a life, and mature, and move on, and let’s start doing work that we’re elected to do,” Wagner said Saturday. “Slanderpalooza needs to end.”Two days ago, when the council’s appointed “inspector general” Jon Kaney released two dozen transcripts of interviews with several of the area’s political insiders and public officials, the inner workings of Waverly became one of the focal points. Two former employees said they still feared reprisal from Sotolongo or his associates. Both said they’d been assaulted before. Their accounts, told in detail and on the record, painted a portrait of intimidation, violence, unpaid bills and closed-door meetings between Sotolongo, his business partner and girlfriend Ramara Garrett and their close friend, Wagner.Wagner, long a critic of the drawn-out investigation into Waverly campaign contributions that he said was illegal for the council to undertake in the first place, said that portrait was a result of the enemies he’s created by being an outspoken and sometimes confrontational politician.“When I read some of these interviews, I literally was laughing out loud at the accusations,” Wagner said Saturday, the day after Kaney released them. “ ... But then when you get the results of the probe, and you realize what they’re basing this probe on, you get a little mad. Because it’s insane. The only good thing out of this thing is seeing how insane it really is.”

Kaney’s interviews included every member of the County Council, some past members and candidates, and the county’s manager, attorney and other public officials. A theme throughout many of the interviews was Waverly’s push to get certain candidates elected, whether Wagner was involved, and if he was, whether it was part of a plan to install a majority to influence county policy decisions in areas like the Halifax Area Advertising Authority or the Ocean Center. Wagner’s ally Ted Doran chaired the HAAA board in 2011, when the HAAA fired its director and hired a new one who turned out to share their vision for taking Ocean Center bookings out of the county’s control. It became a near-constant fight. The board removed Doran in 2012, and the new director eventually resigned.But Kaney’s interviews also included people like Manny Bornia, the American Music Festival promoter who worked for Sotolongo and published Waverly’s “Floridian View” magazine, and P.J. Warner, a real-estate agent who worked with Sotolongo for more than two years, while Waverly was making deals worth millions of dollars before the FBI stepped in and got an indictment of Sotolongo on mortgage fraud.“It was very comical, and I may actually write a book afterwards about what I witnessed in the two-and-a-half years,” Warner told Kaney during a February interview in a Daytona Beach hotel.“What’s an example of a crazy thing?” Kaney asked.“Not paying their bills,” Warner said. “Having people come in their front door threatening to kill people.”“The two years that I worked for these two individuals were probably the worst two years of my life,” said Bornia, who met Kaney for an interview in Vero Beach. (Bornia has long since moved out of the Volusia area and declined to comment for this story.) “I apologize if I get emotional because it was a very difficult time for me personally. I dealt with everything from fraud to physical abuse. I was beaten up a couple times. It was very difficult.”“Excuse me, who beat you up?” Kaney asked.“Jim Sotolongo. Physically abused me twice. One time he went to hit me with a metal bar and actually I was pulled under a pavilion. And Josh Wagner was present. And Josh was one of the people who blocked him from doing that.”Bornia said during his time with Waverly, Sotolongo also grabbed him by the neck, threw him to the floor and broke his glasses. He said Sotolongo “would literally come into the office and flip desks. Literally take a desk, flip it. It scared the living daylights out of employees. That’s how it was.” He said Sotolongo “sat me down one day in my office and told me how he had kidnapped someone, had kept them in their bathtub for three days and urinated on him for three days. He looked at me with a straight face and told me that.”“Did you believe him?” Kaney asked.“Yeah. Hell yeah, I believed him. I believe him now. I absolutely believed him.”Bornia has given similar accounts in the past, when he was still working for Sotolongo, but never on the record because he said he feared for his and his family’s safety.Warner said Sotolongo “took a swing” at him once when Warner confronted him about money owed. Warner pushed him back, then went to Garrett and told her he’d go to the police and report an assault if she didn’t pay him his money. “I got the money,” he told Kaney. “She gave it to me in a heartbeat.”“I have a weapon’s permit,” Warner added later. “I carry a gun now. That’s how bad it is. Yes, I do. And I don’t even — I’m renting a house right now because I don’t want him to know where I live. That’s how bad it is. Until he is — something happens to him, I mean, I think he’s bad news. Very, very bad news.”

Wagner’s close friendship with Sotolongo has caused others involved in Volusia’s political arena to question what Wagner knew about what Sotolongo was doing. Wagner has consistently said he was not aware of anything illegal, and he will remain friends with Sotolongo despite his criminal activities. Sotolongo also cooperated with federal prosecutors in 1995 and struck a plea deal in a cocaine and money-laundering case. In 2006, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration named him as “having a major role” in an organization that was buying upscale homes throughout South Florida (and in the Naples, Tampa and St. Petersburg areas), then using them to start marijuana grow operations. He was never charged.“Who doesn’t have a friend that’s been arrested in this world?” Wagner said Saturday. “I’ve helped those people in life. I’ve counseled them … I’m not going to disown people. That’s how I am. That’s how I was brought up. My enemies can continue to not like me, for probably some other reason. They can continue to use this to validate it in some way.”Wagner’s partnership with Garrett, among others, in a bid to put a restaurant on the historic Daytona Beach Pier, amplified the talk about his ties with Waverly. Then the bus-bench questions started. One day in 2011, an ex-Waverly employee called the local elections office to report that Waverly made in-kind campaign contributions in his and his wife’s name. The next year, the elections supervisor noticed a series of suspicious Waverly contributions (mostly in political ads) and contacted the State Attorney’s Office, whose investigation — just last week — cleared all the candidates who received Waverly donations. But Wagner characterized Kaney’s Waverly interviews as rumor and speculation, and even Kaney told the people he was interviewing that the interview was not a deposition, and they were free to share rumors they’d heard. Wagner said the comments that painted him as a ringleader of Waverly’s illegal campaign support of certain candidates came from a local political circle that’s become “so incestual, that it’s become a high school.”“They really do sit around in a back room and drink coffee and whiskey and talk about people, and it festers into this negativity that’s so toxic,” he said. “There are bad people in our community. There are genuinely bad people here. And they’re not who you think they are. It’s really a shame how people cannot let stuff go and do the right thing.”Warner, the ex-Waverly real-estate agent, said he didn’t know Wagner personally, but told Kaney “he was in there with Jimmy and Ramara all the time. I mean, they would go in the conference room next door and talk for hours. Talk -- absolutely talk for hours.”Wagner said he’s never denied that he was and is close with Sotolongo and Garrett. But he said he was rarely in the Waverly office, and not nearly to the extent that Warner said. “Not that I care anyways, but I wasn’t. The fact that these people make things up because they think it’s bad … I just wasn’t.” He said he never saw Warner when he was there.Warner said he’s been in real estate in the Volusia area since 1990, and he’d never seen a group get so involved in so many big deals as quickly as Waverly did. “I never saw two people come in and make such a big splash,” he told Kaney. “And it seemed like they knew everybody and did everything so quickly.”Warner added later: “They think they’re being targeted in this. They just believe that they’ve done nothing wrong. And I’m telling you, they’re good. When it comes to telling stories, they could convince you. I even told the FBI guy the other day…I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t walk out of there and you guys have to write an apology letter to them. That’s how good they are. And they’re good, they’re sneaky, they know how to cover their butts, you know.”Bornia told Kaney that Sotolongo and Garrett had duped both him and Wagner.“More recently I ran into Josh on the street,” Bornia said. “I was visiting my mother-in-law and just ran into him. He gave me a hug. And he said, ‘I guess maybe things weren’t exactly as they had been described.’ We left it at that. There really wasn’t — there is no relationship or friendship to solve there. It kind of evaporated after what happened. It’s tough to play that all out again in my head.”“Do you believe Josh was telling the truth when (he said) that he had no understanding of what Jimmy was about?” Kaney asked. “He would have nothing to gain by lying to me,” Bornia said.“Don’t you think that if he admitted to you that he was misleading you, he would have something to lose from saying that?” Kaney asked.“Candidly, Jon, at that point, if you sit somewhere with someone for a couple of years and they beat the crap out of you, and they tell you you’re crazy, and they tell you you’re stupid, and they tell you you’re an idiot, and they beat the crap out of you again, I hate to sound like any less of a guy, but the truth of the matter is sometimes you start believing that maybe you’re the one. This guy is a mastermind at this. I know now he’s left a trail of people like me in his life. He is talented.”“So are you saying you think Josh was duped?”“I think so,” Bornia said. “I have no reason to believe otherwise. I really don’t.”